The Road to Redemption
by JennaLouise
Summary: An altercation with The Foot has left Raphael wounded and his three brothers gone, presumed dead. Convinced they are still alive, and determined to find them, Raphael embarks on a personal mission to redeem a terrible crime.
1. Chapter 1 To My Father Have Honour

_Hi there :)_

_I know it is probably unwise to have more than one story on the go, but this is a story I've been planning for some time, and eventually had time to start writing. It is the story of a difficult path to make right the wrongs of a certain, impulsive turtle._

_As usual, I will be using myriad sources of the TMNT universe as backstories._

_The usual disclaimer applies: TMNT and all associated characters are owned by Mirage._

**The Road to Redemption**

**Part 1**

**Chapter 1 – To My Father Have Honour**

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk"

- John Keates, _Ode to a Nightingale_

* * *

When it begun, Splinter's ears were pricked with concern and in what had become an uncharacteristic gesture, he had abandoned ninjutsu etiquette and reached his paws towards Raphael, his arms open and loving, alarmed to see his son so badly wounded, and Oh God, so foolish. So ignorant.

But as Raphael confessed, his eyeband wet with the hot tears, which he had ceased trying to stop or hide, his shameful gaze averted from the father that had trusted him, his hands clenching into fists as he knelt on the ground, not even caring that he was kneeling in the glistening scarlet puddle of his own blood, Splinter's ears had flattened against the back of his head.

Raphael couldn't watch, but he knew, could sense, could visualise, that Splinter was stepping backwards away from him, his eyes blinking in horror and grief, his fur standing on end like static. Raphael could hear his father's breath shortening, and a gravelly husk that he wasn't familiar with worked its way into his father's voice:

"Raphael. Get out of my dojo. I cannot look at you."

But he couldn't move. He was dizzy, and a cold sensation swept him up for a moment, and he dropped forward, planting his hands firmly onto the concrete, his body shuddering as something his mind couldn't identify seemed to cause every muscle in his stomach to contract and spasm.

"I'm sorry, father," he whispered, and then, as if someone had just kicked him squarely in the gut, he vomited on the spot, languidly and exhaustedly, until there was nothing left in him but bile and putrid acid, spilling out of him into the pools of blood which already surrounded him.

For a moment he stared down at the widening puddles of fluids which had come from inside him, and an ironic voice in his head commented that his insides were quite literally draped over the cement floor of the dojo, horrible, gruesome, wretched. Gasping, he gazed up at Splinter long enough to see dull, unsympathetic eyes, tinged with anger…

Hatred…

He passed out with that image in his mind: his father, willing to leave him to die, spewing his internal organs; his father, who ten minutes ago had still loved him.

* * *

April hesitated before descending the manhole. The winter had drawn a ravaging chill over New York City, and her hands were gloved with the slippery texture of wool. She clasped a large paper bag into her chest, procuring some warmth from it. The cool air nipped her cheeks pinks and her lips were sore – the chilled winter breeze aggravating the open skin, angry and painful, the fresh scars of a habit she had never been able to shake. Lip biting.

She yanked her gloves off with her teeth, to enable a proper grip on the metal ladder. She had slipped one winter and nearly fallen, and was not willing to take that chance again, not with only one turtle now inhabiting the lair, and him incapacitated with devastating wounds. April had to admit it, sadly, as she clambered ungracefully down into the city's sewer canals, that she had grown rather accustomed to the security of knowing that she had four strong rescuers on call. But now she didn't. Raphael would recover, she was certain of that, and Casey was always willing, but it wasn't the same. Not only had she come to love her reptile friends over the years that she had known then, but suddenly she was viewing the world as a dangerous place again, riddled with accidents waiting to happen. But worse, worse was the loss of her independence. Five years ago she was feisty and independent and never had to call on anyone. But five years of being surrounded by ninjas who worshipped her had left her nervous of a world without them.

She picked her way carefully through the labyrinth of catacombs to the lair. It wasn't far; she had used the nearest secluded manhole.

Sadness quelled in her gut as she pulled the security lever: Don's security system, and it suddenly dawned on her that it would never be updated. What had started out as little more than a make-shift door that Splinter had erected in his early days of mutation, had over the years adapted with Donatello's ever-growing knowledge of technology, like an organic development, an evolving defence to protect the turtles from a world which would want to see them destroyed. But now it was static. Now it wouldn't develop. Without Donatello, the lair would remain as it was, and eventually stagnate.

And that thought brought with it another: Donatello, his bright, grey eyes, his gentle, bashful manner, his ruthless ambition for knowledge and science, his calm confidence in everything he orchestrated. Donatello. April winced and pushed the image of her friend away. Now was not the time for grief.

The brickwork parted and she stepped in. The lair was quiet and in darkness. Heavy, and desolate with the misery. "Splinter?" she called.

And from the darkness, rodent eyes glittered at her. "Miss O'Neil. I am here."

April stepped in. Splinter was sitting in the dark at the little breakfast table. Yesterday he had been at the entrance to meet her. Today he seemed to lack the energy. "Master Splinter," she said softly. "Are you alright?"

"Child, I am…" His voice trailed.

April nodded, and had to press her lips together to prevent the quiver that was threatening in her lower lip, as a surge of emotion jolted inside her. She wanted to go to him, to stroke his fur, to comfort him, but somehow it had always been inappropriate for her to touch the elderly rat, a ninja master, who had always seemed beyond the simplicities of emotion and comfort.

So she stepped in and flicked on the light switch. Splinter jarred slightly and his eyes winced as the light flooded his retinas. Already the temperature was warmer, thanks to Donatello's thermal-regulation heating system, and she unwound her wool scarf from her neck and placed it on the table. Donatello.

"I've brought Raph some oral antibiotics for when he wakes up," she said, and started to unpack the paper bag she had been carrying. "Just in case he gets infected. I'll go and check on him."

Splinter nodded. "Yes. I know my son will recover." He broke off suddenly, and April was certain that she caught a glimpse of moisture sparkling in his eyes as he stood up. "Miss O'Neil, if you would excuse me…" he leaned on his stick, and limped awkwardly into the dojo.

It was all so awful. So unthinkable. The lair was horrendously quiet. April shuddered, and for a moment grief was churning in her stomach, and her lip was starting to tremble again. But no. She would now allow herself to cry. Not now. Not here. It was inconsiderate, selfish to cry when for Splinter and Raphael the grief would be so much more poignant, but less liberal.

She took a breath, gathered herself, and marched purposefully towards Raphael's room. She knocked, but there was no answer.

He lay as she had left him, on his back which he usually hated, but his injuries would not have sustained lying him on his belly, or even on his side.

Splinter had called her two days ago, and she and Casey had hurried over. They had picked Raph up off the dojo floor, and she had calmly cleaned and sutured his injuries. They had lain him in his bed, and Casey sat with him whilst she had returned to the dojo to clean up the vile combination of blood and sick from the floor.

She didn't have time to think about the terrible news Splinter had borne, and she pushed the thoughts away savagely when they came. There would be a time for grief, and this wasn't it.

Now, she stepped into the darkness of Raphael's room, flicking on the light as she did and the room sparked up with fluorescent illumination. On the bed, without his ninja bands, Raphael looked small, and not nearly as terrifying as he usually appeared.

She sat on the bed, feeling the uncomfortable groan of broken mattress springs beneath her. She lifted the turtle's arms, inspected each wound, checked for signs of infection, tilted his head towards the light.

He seemed to be doing well, given the circumstances.

And then the tears were there, hot in her eyes and she couldn't stop them. She lowered herself against the turtle's sleeping body, and sobbed into his shoulder, and the more she sobbed, the more terrible the situation became. Her world was over, life would never be the same again: she would never sit with Donnie and discuss the latest developments in the world of physics, or create cruel and clever viruses to devastate enemy computers; she would never see Mikey's round, blue eyes blinking at her innocently from behind a playful and eager grin as he threw a stream of earnest love at her; she would never talk with Leo again, and feel comforted in life just from knowing that he was somewhere nearby.

"April, what the fuck?" Raph grunted underneath her, and she sat up hurriedly, embarrassed, wiping her tears away from her eyes with her sleeves.

Raph gazed up at her, his eyes docile and blank.

"I just came by to check on you – how are you feeling?"

Raph didn't reply. He looked away, towards the wall.

"Are – are you in pain? I can give you some painkillers if you need?"

But he didn't answer. A slight jarring of the head perhaps, declining the offer, but it was so minute that April wasn't even sure she had seen it.

His eyes, which a moment ago had been sharp, were glazing, and within moments he was breathing the steady rhythm of sleep. He had lost blood. He needed the rest.

April scrubbed at her face, trying to disperse the remnants of her tears. She didn't want Splinter to see her cry.

But when he stepped back into the sitting room, Splinter was no-where to be seen. She left quietly, her mind only briefly pausing to wonder why the loving rat was not sitting at the bedside of his ailing son.

* * *

Days passed unnumbered. Raphael woke several times, usually to the sight of his bedroom ceiling, cracked and horrible, encrusted with mottled mould. He was on his back, on his shell, which meant he couldn't get up with ease.

But each time he opened his eyes, all he could feel was grief. And anger. And guilt. It was choking him from inside, like a hand clamped tightly around his trachea, cutting off his air supply. And for a while he was weak enough to summon unconsciousness to relieve him from the Hell which was engulfing his soul in the waking world.

For a while, he didn't know if he had dreamed the whole thing.

But then one afternoon he opened his eyes and saw Splinter. His father watching him. Raphael tried to move, tried to lift his hand up to Splinter. He wanted him so badly, and inside him stirred the young child he had suppressed so long ago, the child who would go to his father for comfort, the child who needed his father now.

He heard a voice grating out of his throat, hoarse and choked, and nothing like his own: "Father."

Splinter stared down at him, unsympathetic. Stern. "Raphael, you are healing. You lost blood and have slept for three days. April has tended to your wounds. Now you must heal yourself."

And then he walked away.

For what felt like an eternity, something in Raphael's chest seemed to cave. For an eternity he was falling to pieces. For an eternity an emotional agony writhed furiously inside him. For an eternity he thought he was dying. For an eternity he wished he would.

But then it stopped. Then there was nothing. A blank emptiness, a hollow cave, housing nothing. An expanse of desert, untouched by nourishment, devoid of water. Desolate. Vacant.

He heard himself sigh hoarsely, and his torn and scarred arm went up to wipe fresh tears from his face.

He gripped onto the sides of the bed, and with a groan of pain in cramping muscles, he rocked himself off his carapace and onto his side. It was arduous work, but he succeeded, and for a moment a new agony tore across his midriff and he heard the hideous sound of bone grating against bone. His fingers brushed against a fracture in his plastron, which the movement had shifted.

He lay panting and after a moment the pain eased.

So he sat up.

Swung his legs around.

Felt his feet touch cold concrete.

He felt nothing. No emotion. Calm.

He gripped the edge of the bed tightly, holding himself steady while he swayed with wobbly weakness.

After a moment he pushed himself forward.

Pain, instantly there was pain, bolting up and down through his limbs, rampaging in his head, but he ground his teeth together and, with one hand against the wall, started a slow and agonising walk into the sitting room.

Splinter was there, watching the television, his eyes anchored on the screen, but vacant, like he was not really seeing it.

"There is soup in the fridge," Splinter said, without looking at him. "And Casey delivered something called a 'sub'. You should eat. You will need to regain your strength." His voice was cold.

Raphael hobbled forward, like a fucking gimp. "Father," he began, but stopped himself. "_Sensei_." He bowed, as deep as he could manage. "I'm sorry."

Splinter offered him a cursory glance. "For years Raphael I warned you that your anger would destroy you. I just did not expect you to drag your brothers down with you."

Mention of his brothers reignited the flame in his chest, and for a moment Raphael thought he would stop breathing from the pain as fire licked and coated his each inhalation, but he squeezed his eyes shut and pulled himself together with a breathless sigh, and fixed his father with a stoic look.

"I will fix the wrongs I've done, Sensei," he whispered. "I will find my brothers and bring them home."


	2. Chapter 2 A Conflict Like No Other

**Chapter 2 – A Conflict Like No Other**

"Here I disclaim all my paternal care,

Propinquity and property of blood,

And as a stranger to my heart and me

Hold thee from this for ever."

- William Shakespeare _King Lear _

* * *

It was like a cold well had developed inside his soul. He couldn't meditate anymore. Five minutes encased in silence and the widening hole in his heart seemed to grow into a dark and tumultuous chasm of grief and emptiness.

Splinter, therefore, could only find refuge in his soaps.

With the lair shrouded in a continuous and organic silence, it was the only way he could occupy his mind with anything besides despair.

But no matter how hard he focused, how forcibly he pushed his dedicated mind away, always their faces returned to him: his sons.

He hadn't meditated for three days.

His sons. His beloved sons. Dead.

What more was there to do? His life was over.

There was still a light on in Donatello's lab – he had left in such a hurry that day that he had forgotten to flick it off. The fluorescent bulb still hummed softly, like a trapped comfort, a nod to his last activities in the family home. Splinter could see the yellow glow glimmering from under the door. It was almost as if Donatello had never left. Perhaps Splinter could let himself believe that his son was there, concealed in the scientific and mechanical world he had created therein. Donatello. Splinter ached at even thinking the name, like a twist in his internal organs. Donatello. His gentlest son. Conflicted by a pacifistic nature, but an athletic and creative fighter nevertheless. Fiercely protective of his intelligence, always hungry to discover more about the world, never content to simply accept anything on someone else's say-so. Donatello, olive skinned, grey-eyed, mottled shell of wonderful textures and swirling colours.

And the lair was so quiet in the stark and unsettling absence of his youngest. His Michelangelo, who always succeeded in bringing energy into the home. When things were bad, or sour moods encapsulated his other sons, there was always Michelangelo's laughter hooting through the sewer tunnels, which was an uplift to his heart. When he was new to fatherhood, Splinter had liked to bounce Michelangelo on his lap, just to take some comfort from the large blue eyes which gazed back at him with such simple and unadulterated affection.

But it was the absence of his oldest which seemed to be lulling his so helplessly in empty grief. Without Leonardo, Splinter had nothing. No-one to share hours of mediation with, no-one who accepted his teachings so absolutely in efforts to better himself. Leonardo was the kindred spirit Splinter had longed for: dedicated, passionate and the possessor of innate and infinite strength, a battle-scarred soul who had earned his wisdom. Leonardo eyes seemed to appear in front of him, solemn and strong and Splinter felt his own eyes like hot marbles become almost unbearable in their sockets as tears, warm and salty, stung relentlessly.

But he couldn't bear to think about his fourth son. For years, Splinter had seen this day: the days when his fourth son's inability to control himself would wreak a cruel and unmentionable havoc. He had dreaded it. Raphael had always been vulnerable to an unfavourable fate, and Splinter had accepted this long ago. But he had always trusted that Raphael's loyalty would somehow protect his brothers, that when the day came it would be an act of self-sacrifice.

He was wrong.

* * *

When the brown eyes that had, moments ago, been staring back at her glazed over into a glassy window of the reverie their possessor had fallen into, April looked away and sipped her coffee.

"Raph?" she offered gently, attempting to encourage him back into reality.

He blinked, and the sharpness returned to his focus.

"What?" he snapped gruffly.

She smiled at him, as earnestly as she could, and shook her head, not answering.

They were sitting in the kitchenette, with steaming cups of coffee warming their palms.

She was dressed casually, had adorned herself in loose-fitting jeans and one of Casey's sweaters in a hurried and futile attempt to disguise how much weight she'd lost. But of course there was never tricking a turtle. When she arrived, Raphael had taken one cynical look at her and mumbled that she was looking skinny.

"You're not looking so buff yourself!" she had thrown back at him, and he had accepted her comment with a brooding silence.

The truth was she hadn't had much of an appetite since it happened, and, she suspected, neither had he.

She sipped the coffee again, folding her lips around the reassuring taste, and swallowing slowly, like she was participating in one of Splinter's fabled tea ceremonies, an occasion she had never witnessed but had been the feature of many of Michelangelo's comic and affectionate stabs at his father.

The thought struck her like a chord, and all lightness at the image vanished as her heartbeat quickened and there was a painful flutter of emotion in her solar plexus: Mikey.

Even from his dark silence, Raphael apparently noticed, "What's with you, April?" he asked. His voice was a low husk, like a sick combination of gravel and hollowness.

"Nothing, Raph, I –"

"Agh, forget it," he mumbled waving a hand dismissively at her, as if he were no longer concerned with her sadness.

She cleared her throat. Silence in the presence of Raph had grown to be comfortable over the years she had known him: he never had been much of a chatter, but between the two of them now, with recent events still raw in their minds, and him looking like death, it was suddenly not a happy status.

"Why don't we have something to eat?" she suggested, carefully keeping her tone evasive and unconcerned. The last thing she wanted was for Raph to feel trapped or backed into a corner. It wasn't an effective method of getting him to comply.

He paused, leaned back in his chair so that his damaged carapace braced against the backrest. He looked for a moment like he was going to protest, but after a brief moment of consideration, appeared to decide that it wasn't worth the hassle. "Sure," he said. "Whatever."

It wasn't the reaction she'd been hoping for, but it was a result.

She reached across the table, and gently pried his fingers from the cup. He let his hand fall submissively onto the knotted wood of the old, time-scarred surface of the table. She squeezed his hand for a moment and then got to her feet before he could pull away.

"I'll make some pizza," she suggested.

Raphael shook his head. "There should be some granola in the cupboard."

She nodded and manoeuvred herself around the narrow kitchen units. His mood was entirely understandable. Raphael blamed himself, and with Splinter's uncharacteristic and critical accusations, it was hardly surprising. After two weeks of witnessing the cool treatment and resentful glares he offered his only surviving son, it was easy to want to judge the rat, to shake him and demand that he show some of the compassion he had always taught his sons. But who was she to judge Splinter? He had just lost three sons. He was grieving. He would come around, realise that whilst Raph may have been spared the fate of his brothers, he hadn't caused the explosion which had taken their lives.

She took time in serving the granola: she needed a moment away from Raph's haunted, harrowed expression, a minute away from the heavy aura of depression which seemed to be emanating from him. She needed a moment to come up for some air. The granola rattled softly and pleasantly into the bowl. And she busied herself with another pot of coffee, just to prolong the moment. But as she returned the milk to the fridge her eyes fell upon the dazzling array of fridge magnets, alphabetical letters artistically designed into the nonsensical lyricism of Mikey's humour-laden verse. The sight of them turned April's stomach, and she slammed the fridge shut. She had to look away, had to block out the sudden and poignant reminder of a loved one now gone.

But it didn't take long for her mind to find something else to concentrate on. When she returned to the table, Raph had slipped back into the same absent stance which had encapsulated his earlier, vacant eyes, old beyond his meagre years, and now framed with lines and dark circles, imprinted there by the replaying visions of memories he had not yet put a name to.

His eyes snapped back into focus when she placed the bowl on the table, and – as if suddenly overwhelmed by a violent emotion of some description – he grimaced suddenly, and banged his fist on the table, his face sculptured into an ugly contortion of itself.

April jolted back, backing away until the small of her back met the counter.

Raphael made a low, growling sound of frustration.

And that was when Splinter entered. He shuffled past, and Raphael fell instantly silent, averting his eyes. April, too, stayed silent, as the elderly rat moved into the kitchenette, gathered some sushi from the fridge and left in his own breed of silence.

And April felt a twist of anger. _Be there for your son! He needs you!_

Something in her expression must have betrayed her, because Raph looked at her strangely and said softly and with a chilling absence of emotion: "Leo was his favourite. He'll never forgive me for taking him away."

* * *

Confined to the cruel restrictions of home for weeks was beginning to induce a crazed paranoid cabin fever. Raphael was convinced for three days that he was on the brink of pure insanity.

In the early hours of one morning, he woke up to Leonardo's solemn gaze.

It was a rush of joy which pulsated through his blood. Leo! Alive and sitting on his bed, watching him sleep! Alive and safe! And not even harmed! They were wrong. It had all been a misunderstanding. Leo was alive. Maybe, that meant, his mind scrabbling for coherence, that Don and Mike were alive too.

He sat up hurriedly, ignoring the bite of pain in his back. "Leo!" he cried, eagerly. "I thought you were dead."

Leonardo nodded sadly and shifted his weight, and Raph felt the springs in the mattress groan with reluctance.

"We're not dead, Raph," he said. "We never were."

The relief was so rich, and so invigorating that Raph felt tears stabbing at the back of his eyes. A weight seemed to lift, and for a tremendous moment he was able to breathe clearly for the first time in weeks. Not dead. Not dead. Alive. Home, and safe.

For a moment emotion was such a good thing. He felt light and an adrenaline-fuelled happiness seemed to swill inside him, erasing the trauma and the awfulness of the weeks where he thought his brothers were gone.

Raphael reached forward and took hold of the rim of Leonardo's carapace in both hands. He felt the ridged texture, the comforting touch of familiar keratin against his calloused fingers. He felt his brother's skin against his arms, felt his body move with breath. He could smell Leonardo's scent, the fabric of his bandana, the leathery texture of his kneepads.

And Raph actually laughed and joy quickened his heart rate. He had missed his brother so much, so much that it had been a physical pain inside him, and in this moment as he clung to him in relief and revelling in the exoneration of fate, the reprieve his family had been granted, he vowed instantly to never take his brother for granted again, to never forget how much he loved him. To always cherish him, and to forget the petty squabbling which had tainted their relationship for so many years.

He felt his fingers rubbing against his brother's shell, remembering the grooves, tracing the curves. Whatever bitter quarrels had happened between them, it didn't matter anymore. All that mattered is that the brother he had feared dead was a live, and sitting with him right now.

He grinned stupidly at Leo, suddenly at a loss for words.

But Leonardo's gaze remained sombre, and when he spoke his voice was strangely detached and hollow: "Raph. We are lost. We are wandering strange and fearful realms. We walk a path of uncertainty, filled only with pain and despair."

Raph blinked. "But, Leo, I –"

"You have to find us, Raph; you have to stop them."

And suddenly the joy had vanished, and a cold fear was beginning to claw at his throat and a desperate need for his brother was all consuming.

"You have to, Raph. For all our sakes."

And Raphael, suddenly compelled to hug his brother tighter, to stop him from leaving, slumped forward into empty space as the figure he had been grasping dissipated and vanished from his hold.

Raph's hands clasped at nothing, as he fought to retrieve what suddenly he doubted had been there. Leo. Not back. Not home. Not safe.

He plummeted hard and fast into a tortured feeling that his mind couldn't even register. He heard himself sobbing, a dry, raucous sound of anguish, and moaning his brother's name over and over and over. A magnitudal rush of terrible emotion spilled out of his chest, cutting off his air supply, tearing his soul up into pitiful fragments of the person he once was, until exhausted by the pain of the loss, he fell asleep, his hands still clawing at the air as if in some unconscious attempt not to lose the feeling of his returned brother.


	3. Chapter 3 To Repress the Irrepressible

**Chapter 3 – To Repress the Irrepressible**

"_Out of his mouth came a sharp sword, with which he will defeat the nations._

_He will rule over them with a rod of iron."_

- Revelations 19 vs 15

* * *

Down below, the pulse of the city throbbed incessantly, and the murmur of traffic, wailing sirens and the occasional, distant gunshot formed a backdrop of sound, to perfectly complete the picture.

Raph blinked up at the moon – dull and grim and humourless, veiled by a shroud of moisture, it gazed back down at him frowning with disapproving menace.

And for some bizarre reason that felt entirely logical, Raph growled at the moon, and fixed it with a challenging stare.

What he was challenging it to do, he was not sure, but he maintained the glare nonetheless. He even got to his feet from the squatting position he had been holding, and clenched his fists and teeth at it.

Fucking moon.

He was there. The spot. The rooftop of a downtown warehouse. The warehouse where everything had gone to shit.

The rooftop had not yet been rebuilt – if indeed the property was even owned by anyone now. It had been standing desolate long enough for The Foot to claim it as their own.

Leaving the moon to wallow in its own arrogance, he scrambled to the east corner, to survey the damage for the first time.

The hole opened like a gaping crater, almost a perfect circle. And then plummeted, deep down into the bowels of the building, a well of all-consuming, enveloping darkness.

As he peered down into the pit which had claimed the lives of his brothers, Raph felt his breathing grow thin.

But had it?

Had it claimed the lives of his brothers?

If it had, then why was he battling with a perpetual gnawing sensation in his gut? Why was he having poignant and disturbing visions?

Why was his heart telling him that his brothers were alive?

Alive. And in need of his help.

Logic told him that no-one could have survived the explosion which sent the roof thumping in a screech of concrete, brick, wood and steel, a cataclysmic roar, down to the depths below.

But still.

Anger was welling, thick and fast, and putrid taste riling in his mouth. He wanted so badly to be suddenly faced with an enemy just so he could hurt someone, feel them buckle, hear the last hiss of breath bubble out of them.

So when he sensed movement behind him, he was poised to attack. He spun, sais already in hand, expression moulded into an eager and vicious snarl.

"Easy, Raph. Was wonderin' how long it would be before you came here."

Casey walked forward slowly, with his hands held open. His hockey mask was wedged in his hair, his face was sombre, and his ever-ready bag of sporting weapons was slung casually over his shoulder.

Raph looked away. He hadn't seen Casey since…

Since before.

"What're you doin' out here, bone-head?" Raph snapped, suddenly irritated by his friend's presence.

"Waiting for you."

Raph levelled his still-fierce expression on him, but allowed his sais to drop to his sides in loosely curled hands.

"I've been here most nights for a month, buddy," Casey answered in an uncharacteristically soft voice. He advanced slowly, still with his palms outstretched. As if he were still attempting to remind Raph that he was a friend.

That was when Raph realised. Casey was scared of him. Scared what he might do. At the idea, Raph stifled a bitter laugh. In a perhaps unconvincing effort to ease Casey's anxieties, he slid his weapons into his belt.

"Yeah, well," Raph said, as casually as he could manage, "I ain't been exactly runnin' marathons recently."

"Yeah, I know." Casey eventually came close enough to lightly rest a hand on the turtle's shoulder.

Raph pulled away quickly, not in any mood for sentiment. That was what April was for. And Jesus was he sick of April. She'd been visiting the lair every day, tentatively asking him how he was feeling, making sure he ate, trying to comfort him or something. Ridiculous.

Shit. It was nothing but shit.

Casey may not have seen him for a while, but he was not going to tolerate any more consolation. He'd had enough. He was healed. More or less.

Something in his eyes must have betrayed him, because instantly Casey stepped back, again raising his hands, as if Raph was holding a gun at him.

Raph sighed, hoarse and gravelled. "Well, I'm here. Whaddya want?"

"If you're looking for…" Casey hesitated, and after a moment of pursed lips continued, "… bodies, you ain't gonna find any. I've been looking. That explosion must've shattered everything to pieces smaller than microscopic."

"I ain't lookin' for bodies, asshole."

Casey grinned nervously. "You wanna be alone?"

Raph turned on him, suddenly angry at his stupidity. "I ain't seen you in a month and already you're twice the Neanderthal you were! I'm here to find out what happened to my brothers."

Casey nodded uncertainly. "Splinter said you told him they were dead."

"They were! I mean, I _thought_ they were. But…" his voice trailed.

"But what?" Casey echoed, the chill of impatience biting his tone.

Raphael suddenly growled, deep in his throat. "But nothin'. Go. Fuck off; go home to your girl. She'll be needin' someone to fuss over."

Even as the words came out, Raph knew he was overstepping the line. But he didn't regret it. He couldn't concern himself with it now.

But Casey didn't seem to rise to it. "Hey. It's good to see you. I'm glad you're OK, man," he said.

"You're not gonna hug me, are ya?" Raph replied with a groan.

"Naah. But… you know, if you wanna tell me what happened. I'm… uhh… you know. I'm… here, I guess."

Under normal circumstances, Raph would have bit back a smirk at his friend's awkwardness, but suddenly his stomach was lurching inside him, threatening to spew out his dinner. What happened. Holy fuck. He didn't want to talk about what happened. He didn't even want to remember what happened. Every time his mind touched on it, he saw in slow motion what he did. His despicable actions which cost his brothers their lives.

Or maybe not.

He let himself sink to a squat, drawing a single sai as he did and pressing the centre shaft against his brow. Closing his eyes against the glimpse of his own tragic reflection in the metal, he breathed raggedly for a moment, composing himself.

Eventually, he mustered the will to speak. "I think they're alive, Casey."

There was an uncomfortable pause, and for a moment all he could hear was the rush of the wind and the hum of the city gurgling below.

"Uhh… say what now?" came an eventual, reluctant answer.

"Dig the wax outta your ears why doncha!" Raph hissed.

Casey lowered himself down next to him, planting himself firmly into a sitting position. "Why would you think they are alive? You told Splinter everyone was killed."

"I know," Raph answered, a little softer. "But… I just have this… I just know. They're alive."

Casey laughed uneasily, teasing almost. "You sure that ain't grief speakin', Raphie?"

Raph glared at him.

"It's just that… I mean, _man, _look at the hole in this building. No-one could survive. How did you escape anyway?"

Raph looked away, shame curdling in his gut. "I went after Karai."

"That two-faced bitch? She split?"

"No. She wasn't here at all."

Casey nodded, although clearly not understanding, perhaps not realising that Leonardo's instructions that day were that they were to leave Karai alone. Instructions that Raphael had shamelessly disobeyed, which ultimately spared his life. Or at least being caught in whatever net had snared his brothers.

A cruel irony: the same impulsiveness which had killed his brothers had also been his saviour.

Not killed. They had not been killed. It wasn't possible.

He should have died with them.

Except that they weren't dead.

"Hey, hey, hey! Raph. Take it easy, man."

It was only when Casey's urgent voice broke into his torturous reverie that Raph realised that he was banging his head against the prong of his heavy weapon.

"It's like a voice, Casey," he said hoarsely. "A voice in my soul telling me that they ain't dead. And visions too. Leo tellin' me they are wandering in the wilderness. I _know _they're alive, but I can't explain _how _I know."

The moment of sincerity caved quickly to allow his anger to rise through and he shouted up at the bastard moon, flinging his weapon across the roof top.

He had thrown it with more force than intended. It skidded across the concrete, teetered for a split second on the edge of the massive crevice of the missing roof, and disappeared from view. Moments later, he heard it clatter onto the ground, deep below him, sending a ringing echo vibrating through the air.

The two looked at each other. Casey's face was lined with worry, an emotion strangely unnatural on his face.

"Great. Just great!" Raph cursed under his breath and pushed himself up to his feet.

"Where you goin'?" Casey barked urgently.

"Where do you think I'm goin'? I'm going to get my sai."

"Raph!" Casey jumped up. "Maybe you should let me go."

Raph, who was already storming towards the mouth of the chasm spun on his heal and met Casey's concerned expression with an icy retort.

Casey cleared his throat. "Raph, I don't think you wanna see what's down there."

"Wait. You said there were no bodies."

"I know, there aren't, but…"

"But nothin'. I ain't leavin' my sai down there to get demolished." Raph fixed Casey with a determined glower, and then leapt into the air, and took a moment to relish the rush of the air as he plummeted to ground level.

He landed, balancing himself with the flat of his hand on the ground, rubbled and tortured with the aftermath of explosion. Building pieces were crumbling away, girders had splintered. Glass shattered from the windows. It was any wonder what was left of the warehouse was still standing.

The air was close and heavy with the smog of dust and decay. Pungent and horrible.

Quickly, Raph's eyes locked onto the glistening metal of his weapon, lying innocently in amongst a pile of collapsed brick. He grabbed it, belted it.

"Raph?! You OK?" Casey's voice from above.

"Yeah," he called up. "I'm not gonna risk climbing up though – the building looks like it could fall away any second. I'll meet you round the back."

"Raph, do me a favour will you?"

Raph growled with impatience. "What?!"

"Stay exactly where you are. Close your eyes. In fact, twist your mask round over your eyes. I'm gonna come down to street level, and I'll lead you out."

Raph shook his head in disbelief. "What are you crazy?" he barked out.

"Raph!" Casey's voice was sharp and earnest. "I mean it, man. Just trust me. I'm coming down."

Raph touched his bandana, almost ready to obey Casey's bizarre and, frankly, insane instruction, but he breathed out into the fumes, with the soft touch of words on his mouth: "Trust me, my ass."

Clearly, Casey was trying to protect him from something. And he was going to find out what.

He looked around.

Nothing.

What on earth was going on? What was Casey trying to hide from him?

But there was nothing. Just an empty skeleton of a building, black and ruined. A mass of decrepit, broken nothingness.

He was just dismissing Casey's words as the ravings of a mad man, when his eyes caught a glimpse of…

"Dammit, Raph! I told you!"

Raph spun towards Casey, his eyes wide, his mouth flapping open and closed wordlessly.

He couldn't even feel fury at what he had just seen. He could even feel the emotion that drove him to charge at Casey, seizing him by the lapels of his jacket, shaking him hard.

"Raph! I told you to shut your eyes!" Casey babbled.

And then came the rush of feeling, and a sharp agonising pain tore through his skull, from inside, like the worse kind of migraine known to man. Raph dropped Casey and buckled, wrapping his hands around his temples.

"Easy, Raph, I got you." Casey said gently.

With the pain still hot in his head, Raph let himself be led out into the air, fresh with the pollution of the city.

They crouched behind a set of garbage bins in the alley behind the warehouse as Raph came to his senses.

"That freak has my brothers," he whispered, choking on a constricting trachea.

"Raph, it's a trap. It's gotta be a trap. Don't do anything stupid."

Raph shook his head. "Maybe, but he's still got them!" He buried his head into his palms.

"I wanted to tell you," Casey said, a whine creeping into his voice. "I wanted you to hear it from a friend. I didn't want you to see it."

"Well, I saw it."

The pain was stabbing at his brow, at his temples as the image rolled over and over again in front of his eyes, like the sepia tone of aged film, running on a loop:

The graffitied scrawl of an unmistakeable hand:

'_Out of his mouth came a sharp sword, with which he will defeat the nations._

_He will rule over them with a rod of iron.'_

And then the familiar signature, a Japanese script. The Shredder's emblem.


	4. Chapter 4 Shades of Grey

**Chapter 4 – Shades of Grey**

"Today there is no day or night,

Today there is no dark or light,

Today there is no black or white,

Only shades of grey."

_-- _Barry Mann & Cynthia Wiel _Shades of Grey_

* * *

The aged mirror that had been dug out of a dumpster some seven years ago was Raphael's only known reflection. It was the only mirror he had ever really seen. Sure, he had been in April's apartment, which was literally littered with mirrors, but he habitually avoided locking eyes with his reflection – it was as routine as breathing. He didn't like to look at himself.

But this mirror was different: it was the mirror he brushed his teeth in front of; the mirror he had learned to suture himself in front of; the mirror he used to examine his facial injuries after a fight; the only mirror he had ever dared face. The only image where his reflection was mundane, and not a threat.

He was still shaking. They had walked in silence to the nearest manhole, and Casey had watched him descend into the sewers, with his eyebrows pulled together with a look of concern or apprehension, driving a cleft between his eyes, an unnerving aging mechanism to his young face.

As he had sloshed through the sewers towards the lair, Raphael's mind had been spinning somersaults of anger. The Shredder's offensive emblem scorched into his retinas, so that he could still see the words even when he shut his eyes in a crude attempt to block them out.

He had stormed through the lair, and aware of Splinter's presence in the dojo, headed straight for the bathroom in an attempt to procure some privacy. He washed his hands, wringing his fingers against his palms.

And that was when he looked at his reflection. It was the first time since… since the explosion that he had dared face himself. And at the sight, his stomach knotted itself into twists of repugnant revulsion. There he was: staring back at himself: hideous; a betrayer; dangerous; weak; a coward.

It wasn't a pretty image. His reflection, an ugly enough sight as it was, was further marred by the speckles of mottled rust, obscured and tainted with blemishes tarnished over years of time-abuse and its days as a discarded item deemed fit only for a landfill. That he couldn't properly see his reflection seemed oddly prophetic: nothing was clear anymore.

Still trembling with rage, Raphael stared hard at his reflection, relishing for a moment the strange experience of his own eyes boring straight back into themselves. His brown eyes were wild in whites that had blanched to a blood-shot yellow, irises framed by a sea of veins and harrowed, swollen lids.

Even under the wrinkling fabric of his mask, he could see the lines and dark circles that time and grief had weathered around his eyes. His face, hideously green and sculptured into a perpetual grimace was unbearable to look at. The left side of his face was still bruised, and the remnants of an open wound on his temple were visible from under the red mask. Each time he met eyes with himself he saw what he did. Saw Leonardo's startled eyes and look of disappointment. Saw himself as the monster which drove the looks of alarm and horror onto the faces of Don and Mike.

Saw himself as the grim reaper who abandoned his shocked brothers on the roof of a doomed warehouse.

He growled at himself, bearing his teeth. His molars were a stained yellow, and one of his incisors was slightly crooked, protruding a little further forward than the others. He had never really noticed before, even though his tongue had traced the line of his teeth over many years.

Scrutinising now, he observed that up close he looked very different to his brothers. Whereas he had always seen his brothers as being slightly delicate and graceful, he was heavy and lumbering. His skin was darker and less luminous; his beak was blunt and broad; his face was littered with scars, some fresh, some old, some knitted thickly and others sitting finer. He was a good inch shorter than the youngest and smallest brother, and now that he had spent a month confined to the lair and not well enough to workout, he was not as broad across the chest and arms as he had been, and wondered if he was now as thin as Mikey, too. At the idea, his mind touched a long hated but forgotten word, a taunt from his childhood: 'runt'.

Behind his left shoulder, his shell looked uneven and mal-shaped, giving him an unbalanced appearance.

His gut was churning, performing a series of elaborate flips, as his anger was pushed aside by a new emotion bubbling inside him: an emotion he was unfamiliar with. He squeezed his eyes shut against the awful reflection of himself, as the mirror – the lair's only mirror – suddenly stopped feeling familiar and safe. Suddenly it was another reminder of the monster he had become, another image to haunt his nightmares.

His reflection was grinning horribly at him, and if he hadn't known it was impossible, he would have sworn that it spoke to him, in a low tubercular husk: "Your fault. You did it. Your betrayal. Your actions. Your fault."

Raph shook his head, feeling the detested yet familiar stab of angry tears behind his eyes.

"You left your brothers on that rooftop to die!"

"But I didn't know."

"It doesn't matter if you knew or not that the building was rigged with explosives. What matters is _what happened before you left_. What matters is what you did to your brother."

He wasn't just a monster. He was unforgivable.

He had to get rid of the creature in front of him: banish it, shut it up. No new and misunderstood emotion could sit long with Raphael without anger crawling back up in defence. His rage suddenly seemed to spike back up with a violent surge of self-loathing.

With an anguished yell, and only partially aware of what he was doing, he sent a fist flying forwards.

His reflection split into fragments with a vibrant sound of clattering glass and shattered in shards into the sink, sending dagger shaped slices of mirror around the basin.

His knuckles splintered into bleeding rivulets.

But he couldn't stop the desperate scream which was still erupting from his throat. Seeing his reflection disembody as it had, released a new height to his rage. Usually hearing something break so satisfyingly would have eased something inside him. But his frustration wasn't eased. The pain in his soul wasn't eased. The mirror wasn't enough. Despite his bleeding hand, he sent his fist into the tiled wall, and heard the tinny thud of a single tile dislodging. He kicked the side of the bathtub, and the panel in its side buckled easily. With his left hand he pounded the opposite wall, exposing naked brickwork. His hand seemed to crumple but it didn't stop him. He smashed everything he could see, tore the flimsy and mould-strewn shower curtain away from its rail, tore open the medicine cabinet and threw Don's little pharmacy into a heap of broken glass bottles, white and pink pills glistening in congealing liquid of a sick mixture of iodine and cough syrup.

But none of it helped. Nothing could ease the roaring torment of guilt inside him, not even the sound of the bathroom breaking around him. It was unbearable. It was a different kind of pain from anything he had ever known.

He swept the toothbrush cup off the sink, sending it flying into the wall, and the sound of smashing porcelain met his ears.

Eventually, having run out of things to break, he hurled himself into the wall, the pain of his recent injuries smacking against the tiling instantly cutting short the enraged howl that was still ripping from his lungs. When his carapace hit the wall, some of the fragile keratin fragments which had not yet broken away were knocked loose and he stifled a gasp as the tender flesh beneath his broken shell cried out in exquisite agony, and he sunk exhaustedly – finally defeated – to the ground.

The tear in his plastron grated in belated protest at the violent movement.

He didn't even know if he was crying. All he could hear was his breath, pounding out of him in moans.

"Raphael!" The door opened, and Splinter appeared, little more than a silhouette framed in a doorway of light. And he wondered why the image of contrast of light and dark suddenly seemed so alien to him, as if he had grown accustomed to seeing everything in an undefined, muted shade of grey.

Raphael panted an inarticulate response.

"Is destroying your family not enough? Now you see fit to destroy your home?"

The new emotion again surged violently up from his gut, binding his lungs so that after a couple of moments he was completely unable to breathe. Instantly unable to draw even the smallest ounce breath in and out of his lungs, he banged his fist against the floor in furious bewilderment.

For a moment he spluttered and choked, but quickly the clarity drained from his vision and Splinter's image became blurred by a strange candescence which threatened to steal away all sense of reality in the situation.

And then it happened. His vision became distorted, teetered for a second, and quickly blanched into a monochromatic grey scale, as all colour drained from the scene.

For a moment he was shocked and curious about this new absence of colour and he wondered if it was a hallucination, or if the cones in his eyes had fallen away, subsiding to the more dominant rods, but quickly his thoughts abandoned this new visual development, leaving only terror: terror that he was quite literally suffocating with emotion.

He gave a panicked sound of alarm. It felt as though someone had clamped a tight fist around his trachea, stopping all airflow. He wondered deliriously if his trachea had collapsed, or if his lungs had become immobilised by convulsing muscles. He struggled, gasping, chest heaving to grab at precious particles of oxygen.

And then Splinter was there in front of him, holding his face in his clawed hands. He heard Splinter's ragged voice telling him to breathe. He heard concern and worry in his father's voice, and clung to the idea that the old rat did not want him to die.

"Breathe, my son. Slowly."

Raphael tried, but the fist inside his chest only tightened. He made another panicked keening sound.

"Do not be alarmed. Fear will make it worse. Think back to your meditation. Slowly now." Splinter demonstrated with a slow, deliberate, measured intake of air.

Raphael tried again, concentrating, allowing himself to slip into a meditative trance and he felt his tensing muscles relax and a calm serenity washed over him. As he did, he felt the fist around his windpipe loosen slightly and he felt his chest move as air whistled through his bronchioles.

"Good, my son. Again."

Raphael did as he was told.

Clarity pricked the edges of his vision and Splinter's wide eyes sharpened into focus. He felt his paws smoothing against his face.

Breath started to flow again, and he gasped loudly, sucking desperately at the air. Once his mind told him that it was OK, that he was out of danger, he suddenly felt very tired, like his body had become weighted down by a heavy lethargy.

Seeming to recognise this, Splinter nodded and whispered: "Close your eyes, Raphael."

* * *

When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was a grey toothbrush lying on the concrete floor, surrounded by broken chunks of pale grey porcelain.

He blinked, and the image of the bathroom, ruined and torn apart, sprung into focus.

But no colour.

Everything was sill in monochrome.

He was lying on his side on the bathroom floor. His head was pillowed by something soft, a coarse fabric, flannelled by years of wear. There was a familiar and poignant smell in the fabric, and for a moment he felt the comfort of safety. Then the pillow shifted and he felt the soft brush of fur smoothing against his brow.

He registered then that his head was nestled in Splinter's lap.

"Can you ever forgive me, Father?" he whispered, his voice truncated by remnants of breathlessness.

Splinter's hand did not stop stroking, but the reply came softly and evenly: "Answer me this, Raphael. Can you ever forgive yourself?"

Raphael knew the answer before the words were uttered: "No," he replied gustily.

"Then surely it cannot be of any surprise to you that I cannot forgive you, my son."

Raphael winced. The hand stopped caressing his forehead. And suddenly the overwhelming need to prolong this moment enveloped him as though he knew this would be the last tender moment between them. He clasped the loose folds of Splinter's kimono in his grasp, feeling the thick fabric bunch against his fingers.

And then words, words he had no control over spilled from him, tinged with the weak, pleading tone that later he would despise himself for: "Please don't abandon me, Father."

He thought he heard Splinter take a sharp breath, but he wondered if his whispered words were too quiet for Splinter's aging ears to pick up, because he didn't reply.

After a stagnant pause of silence, Raphael pushed himself up into a sitting position. He looked at Splinter. The rat was wearing a harrowed expression, with dull eyes unfocused, and whiskers flopping down. His fur was a blur of untextured grey.

"I can't see," Raphael said simply. "All the colour has gone."

* * *

With Casey's footfalls echoing in the background as he paced the kitchen, running his hand through his hair in a distracted and now, quite frankly, irritating manner, April tried her hand at a bit of rationalising.

It was futile effort really. She knew what it was like to get swept up in the fire of a volatile reaction. It was virtually impossible to repress. She hadn't earned her label as a fiery redhead for nothing. But her inflamed whims were seldom likely to cost her her life. That was the difference.

It was clear that grief had pushed Raphael into a vendetta he wasn't about to shake. He was determined, to say the least. He, too, was pacing, but not in Casey's helpless way. He was pacing the lair like a caged animal, determined, with fire blazing behind his eyes. He was looking for something. He was clenching his hands so tightly that veins were popping on his biceps, and his breath was raucous and strained. His teeth were gritted and the sound of his molars grinding together set the hairs on the back of April's neck on end. No doubt about it: he was a dangerous character to have for an enemy.

Eventually his eyes caught sight of what he was looking for, and he stalked into the kitchenette, ignoring Casey, and seized the laundry basket.

For some reason he had removed his mask, and seemed to be searching for a replacement.

With a band in hand, he turned around, revealing to April his damaged left side: collapsed carapace, fractured bridge, and the left arm still weaker from lack of use since it had been torn nearly to shreds. And though the angry beast continued to pace, April now saw fragility.

"Raph, please," she said firmly. "Try to be rational."

"Rational?!" Raphael retorted vehemently. "There ain't nothin' rational about any a' this. You don't wanna help me, then don't, but I ain't lettin' you, Casey or any damn rat get in my way. This red?"

He was holding up the bandana.

April nodded, curiously.

He tied the band around his eyes.

"What are you hoping to achieve?" she went on.

Raph turned towards her, eyes blazing, and advanced aggressively. "I tole ya, April! Damn! When did you get to be such a slow learner?"

As he moved within a foot from her, her arms darted out, catching him by the forearms. He twisted in her sudden grasp, but made to real attempt to shake her off. "Raph!" she barked, adopting the same fierce tone her own mother had used to inject some reality into her childhood tantrums. "Your brothers are dead. They are dead. They were in the explosion."

"You don't know nothin'!" he hissed.

"I know that you told Splinter that they were on the roof of the warehouse, and there was an explosion inside which took the entire roof with it."

"What else did Splinter tell you?" Raphael growled tauntingly. "He tell you why they were on the roof? Hmm? He tell you that I beat up my own brother and left them all for dead?"

April, still holding him, shook her head. Over in the kitchenette, she heard Casey's footsteps cease.

Raphael flexed his arms, and her hands fell away from him easily.

"So here's the thing. I'm going to find them. Even if they are dead, I'm going to try. I can't risk them being alive and me doing nothin'. I owe them that."

April felt her heart flutter inside her.

"But Raph," she said quietly, "what if you get hurt? It's clear Saki is alive and left that message to snare you? What if you just end up like your brothers?"

Raphael met her eyes grimly for a moment, and she couldn't identify the emotion boiling behind them. "Then I'll get what I deserve," he said coarsely.

* * *

He took nothing but his sais. No food, no water, no form of shelter, no tools. He left April and Casey in the lair, and Splinter sitting in his chair. He let April hug him briefly, but avoided meeting Casey's eyes, and did not utter a word to his father.

He had trouble finding his way underground: it was a surprise to realise how much he had come to rely on the colours in the world to guide him. The brickwork all seemed to blend together, disguising tunnels that were concealed in the sewer chasms. Shadows seemed paler, and the light darting in from street level through grates above his head seemed dim and awash with emptiness.

When he lost his colour perception, all the warmth of the world had vanished.

What the fuck had happened to his vision? One minute things were fine, and the next he wasn't breathing and couldn't see colour anymore. Had his brain been starved of oxygen and was this some kind of neurological damage? Jesus, he missed Donnie. Donnie would know the answer.

In his curious new grey world, tiny details were lost: cracks in brickwork fell into invisibility; he didn't notice floating debris in the murky water, and what debris he did see failed to catch or reflect any of the fluorescent strip lighting from above; texture and detail fell into oblivion, and all he had was little more than a flat two-dimensional image.

Dark stopped being dark, and light stopped being light.

He couldn't tell the difference anymore between one pale shade and another.

But he wasn't going to let this small visual impairment stop him.

He paused in his stride and let his left hand worry over the grip of his sai. His heart was drumming foolishly fast. After the little incident in the bathroom, his chest felt weak and hollow and his breathing thin and malnourished.

But this was it. The turning point. For a reason he could not pinpoint, he knew that he was embarking upon more than a mission. He was about to begin a long journey. He didn't know how, but he knew it wasn't going to end in Saki's city sky-scraper. Maybe it was Leo's voice whispering to him from beyond, but he knew his quest would lead him out of New York, and into the unknown.

He took a breath, and then stepped forward purposefully, fully entering a world of undefined shades of grey.


	5. Interlude

_For a moment his mind told him that he was dead. _

_But then came the pain and he knew he was alive. Alive and broken. He lay still. His ears still recoiling from the blast, Raphael's world had become soundless and – engulfed in the smog of dense darkness – sightless. _

_His breath had been slapped out of his body on impact, and he could feel his lungs spasming in unthinking reflex, attempting to heave in some air. _

_But the air was… wrong. Something had happened to the air. It was as if the molecules in the air had expanded into large, malignant clumps of dirt. He couldn't breathe. Still splayed on his belly, he lay prone, choking, making frantic and futile efforts to pull something vaguely related to oxygen into his lungs, but it was like eating gravel, and each breath was ruthlessly accompanied by a sharp stab of pain in his chest._

_Even with his eyes closed, darkness seemed to be caving in, closer and closer, threatening to envelope him entirely. He could feel cold metal against his brow, and the rattle of cold rainwater on the back of his neck. Pain everywhere. In a disorientated moment of panic, he forced movement into his fingers and they brushed against cold, wet metal, and the sharp bite of strewn rubble, and the sticky wetness of a liquid his mind dared not allow him to identify. _

_Still battling with the most rudimentary of tasks, he made a final violent attempt at a gasp for air, and as he did, he felt something inside his chest flex slightly, and his deafened ears opened enough to absorb the strange popping sound in his ribs. _

_He must have lost consciousness as quite suddenly his world slipped into an icy black oblivion. _

_He came around with a startling clarity: rationalism spiking in his mind and a precise knowledge of what had happened: the warehouse had exploded, and had thrown him off the roof and into the street below. He must have done some considerable damage on his way down, too, because his left side was screaming in raw pain. _

_His heart was slugging away and sending the reverberation of movement into his skull._

_He could hear the crackle of nearby flames snapping in his eardrums._

_He had no idea how many minutes – or hours – had passed since the explosion, but he knew that he had to move. He had no idea where he had fallen, how visible he was, whether the scorching immolation that was blazing around him was attracting witnesses. He could hear the distant shriek of police sirens approaching. _

_Slowly, and aided by dazed concentration, he mustered the energy to drag his eyelids slowly open. _

_And into his vision swam the pitiful image of a red brick wall, tarnished by debris and fresh fractures, the reflections of flames dancing in its shadows, and furnished by a veil of smoke._

_It was still dark, which meant dawn hadn't crept up yet._

_The fire was close – he could feel its heat, and the concrete beneath him was lit by a flickering orange glow._

_The rain was pattering against the ground, sending fountains of droplets shimmering as they mixed elegantly with far more sinister looking, watery red puddles._

_He took in each fragment of information slowly, too close to it to get the full picture. Each piece was too bizarre on its own for it to make sense. Like a fucking Monet._

_Up. He had to get up. _

_Pain rocketed up his back as he clawed the ground and pushed himself up into a rudimentary kneeling position, with his hands still anchored on the ground. _

_Slowly, the jigsaw started to slot together. He was in the alleyway behind the warehouse. He found that his torrid descent along the pavement had been broken by a large dumpster – the foul metal he was aware of having been concussed against. As if registering that he had suffered a head injury could trigger symptoms, a wave of dizziness swept him up as he swayed on his hands and knees fighting against collapse. Determined, he pushed himself back onto his haunches and rocked on his feet, trying to breathe. Blood was everywhere. In puddles around him, in his mouth, spilling from one of his ears, his nostrils, coating the side of his head, thick and congealing, like a sick and perverse molasses. _

_Vision swimming, he managed to diagnose a few of his injuries. The worst was a fracture in his plastron, a diagonal splinter across his chest and belly. The fracture had created a tiny crevice, protruding out as he tried to move, and each movement was accompanied by the terrifying sound of scraping bone. His stomach turned at the thought. His left arm was battered and immobilised, covered in the blood that was spilling from abrasions and chunks of missing skin. His shell, behind his left shoulder was shattered, smashed like it had simply collapsed on impact, stabbing razor blades of agony into his back. Shards of glass had embedded themselves into his skin in his legs and arms. There was another crack snaking down the bridge of his shell on his left side. _

_And then, as if something clicked in his brain, he forgot his pain as a far more urgent thought shot into his mind, so quickly and so poignantly that it could have been an arrow from a ninja's bow: _

_His brothers. _

_They were still on the roof. He had been caught in the blast from the outskirts. But they… they had been right at the centre of the demolition. _

_Shakily, he got to his feet._

_His vision was still filled with black, dense smoke, billowing from the building's roof as flames continued to lick the sides of the building from behind burned-out windows.. _

_His brothers._

_The thought squeezed the last remaining volume of breath from his lungs. _

_He had left his brothers together, a single unit, in amongst a merciless battle of Foot Ninja. _

_Left them in the path of the explosion. _


	6. Chapter 5 The Presence of Another

**Chapter 5 – The Presence of Another**

"Our domain is the shadow; stray from it reluctantly."

-- Master Splinter

* * *

In a strange and silent eulogy, as he trudged through the sewers, relying more heavily on instinct and memory than on vision, Raphael found old arguments reeling through his mind, arguments which had long been put to rest.

Leo could be a real snot what he wanted to be.

Always he had the last word. Always. A calm, quiet comment, venomous and reeking of cruelty, which would simply drive Raph over the edge and spur him to storm out, lose his fierce tempter, or at worse, launch into a crazed act of violence.

Thinking back, the cruellest words he had ever endured had dripped from Leo's perfect mouth.

Even though some of them hadn't spurred a shred of contention in years, Raph wondered if every incident, every word uttered by his perfect brother hadn't been filed away in his psychology, waiting for the moment to contribute to his snapping sanity.

Funny really.

Tired, he paused in his stride to scuff the sole of his foot against the concrete to relieve an itch. He could hear the abrasive sound of dry, hard skin grating raucously. He sighed, relishing a brief moment of satisfaction which spiked quickly into a pleasurable pain.

It was Leo's words which had crushed down on him the hardest, dealing the final winning blow. It was almost as if he derived some kind of perverse pleasure from winding Raphael up and then watching him explode.

Fucking Leo.

But then, it was Leo who had held him when he was sick: Leo who had sat by his side when it seemed that death was mere moments away; Leo who endured his temper and his moods with quiet and understated tolerance; Leo who loved him like no brother could rival.

Raph's eyes narrowed and he cursed under his breath: _Fucking Leo. _

Leo who, in death, still had power over him.

At the thought, Raph allowed a soft laugh to escape him: "My brothers are dead," he said out loud. "They are dead and off I go lookin' for 'em like a righteous lunatic."

He located the manhole cover, and was climbing the ladder when he felt a sudden and uncharacteristic pang in his solar-plexus.

"Damn," he muttered, as a twist of emotion coiled furiously in his gut.

Home sickness… and… something else.

Not a premonition, but an awareness of what the future held.

It was almost as if Leo was sitting on his shoulder, whispering gentle words into his ear, words he couldn't hear, but words he could feel.

Acknowledging the message, he nodded, and continued his ascent.

"I guess it'll be a while before I see the sewers again," he mumbled, still aloud, as if he could gain some small shred of comfort from the sound of a voice: even if it was his own.

* * *

The idea of climbing to the roof of the warehouse felt like it would a step backwards.

No. He refused to go backwards. He had already been up there and surveyed the structural damage and retraced his path along the asphalt, seen the cracks in the roof – a sculptured record of the moment his plastron had been fractured.

There was nothing more to be gained from the roof. He was going to meet The Shredder's grim message head on. He would walk into the hollow shell of the warehouse with dignity.

Frowning, and aware of an odd tug of tightness in his chest, Raphael stepped out of the darkness of the street, and into the darkness of the warehouse. Rain was sprinkling into the building, invited in by the missing part of the roof, falling hard and intrusively.

Raph ignored it, and strode in.

The warehouse was as it had been earlier. Burned out. Crumbling. Ruined and desolate. Decrepit beams of wood and brick exposed and buckling.

The place was a death trap waiting to happen.

His breathing measured, he marched forward purposefully, only partially aware that his hands were hovering tentatively over the pommels of his sais.

The Shredder's script was still there: bold and horrible. They weren't Saki's words, Raphael was certain. He didn't know where they had been sourced, but they weren't his.

"What the fuck am I doin' here?" he mumbled. "What the Hell am I hopin' to find?"

It seemed as though the entire core of the building had simply evaporated. They must have been fighting at least a dozen Foot Ninja when it happened. The Shredder had been there, not fighting, but overseeing the altercation. Had they all survived? The Shredder had survived to leave the message….

Just letting his mind wander temptingly down the scenario road was enough to open the gates to a rampage of memory and emotion, and he winced, pushing the thoughts away with fierce determination. "Keep focused," he whispered.

And then, quite suddenly, his senses were rushed with a warning: a chill scuttling up his spine, like the air behind him had grown denser, or a minute movement had caused a shift in molecules. Either way, someone was there.

With instinct so ripe in his bones, he had already drawn his sai and spun around to greet the densened air before his mind registered that he wasn't alone.

His eyes darted urgently around the space, ears alert for further sounds, but the continuous cacophony of the city's nightlife in the background obscured any precision in hearing, particularly when, as if in mocking irony, a hoard of police cars elected that moment to screech by, with sirens blaring and setting the warehouse alight with taunting twists of light.

Raph was concealed by the darkness, but for good measure he took a stealthy step backwards until he felt the gentle tap of the graffitied wall meeting his carapace. Immediately he stifled a gasp as the raw flesh under the broken shell, pricked by concave fragments of keratin, recoiled in a twinge of painful protest. He clamped his mouth shut, unwilling to allow his hiss of pain to emerge into the world.

With a quick, eye-flitting search, and warnings of peril pumping adrenaline into his veins, Raph scoured the fraction of light afforded by the police sirens for evidence of another person present, but saw nothing.

Just an empty, fire-gutted warehouse. He could smell the chemical odour of paint from the graffitied letters over his shoulder, but aside from that, all he could smell was the claustrophobic remnants of the ash-strewn destruction.

No body odour, no stale stench of human sweat.

Maybe he had been mistaken.

Hesitantly, he stepped back into the main body of the warehouse, again to survey The Shredder's chilling message, but he could not shake the uncomfortable paranoia of the feeling that he was being watched.

And then there was the unmistakeable rush of movement behind him. Not a sound. Just a vibration of displaced air.

He spun around, colour-blind eyes catching nothing.

Grasping his sai and bringing them across his face to form an X shaped barrier, he growled furiously into the empty darkness.

The Foot. It had to be. Only ninja would be capable of this taunting concealment.

But he stayed in the shadows. It was innate, like a primal instinct. His Master had always drilled it into the turtles to remain out of sight on the surface world. But despite the years of training and every strategy of safety that his Master had attempted to instil in his reckless soul, Raphael still battled with a sneering voice accusing him of cowardice for not striding out into the light and inviting his opponents to meet him in honourable combat.

Adrenaline was shooting like canons into his circulation, and his arms and hands were beginning to quiver in the rush of restrained energy.

And still, his eyes pierced his surroundings, searching furiously for signs of life in the grey hue of his monochromatic world.

Finding nothing, but still desperately aware of the hum of life nearby, he closed his eyes.

In the darkness, he thought he could hear someone breathing.

Someone was there, hiding, not far – somewhere on his left.

_Master Splinter is going to kill me, _he thought, and instantly felt the stab of the poignant ache of emotional torture in his gut.

With his eyes still closed, he leapt forward and out of the shadows, whirl-winding around to the left with his sai aloft in attack stance.

Pure instinct lead him to the spy, and he felt his foot connect with the breastplate of familiar Foot Clan armour.

Hearing the sound of a body crumpling beneath him, he opened his eyes as he landed. He dropped to a dignified squat, and glared fervently, as he found himself face to face with two more Foot Ninja. One gripped a single, gleaming katana, and the other a smaller, but highly polished tanto.

The third ninja was unconscious. The blow must have knocked the air out of his body.

Their amour and masks looked bland in monochrome, and without the benefit of being able to catch eye colour behind the wire-mesh of their masks, they looked sightless and – unusually for Raphael – more menacing.

Raph snarled at them.

"You been waitin' for me, pal?" he muttered.

There was brief, pregnant pause, heavy with anticipation and surging adrenaline.

And then they pounced.

He met their attack with a retort of defensive weapon katas. His surroundings became a blur as he spun in a series of twists and leaps, and lead by impulse rather than vision, sent a cascade of furious kicks and sai-slashes into his victims. He flipped over them and landed squarely, panting.

From the hand of a tall and thickly built Foot soldier, the katana came down towards him, gliding through the air with a familiar swish. Instantly he locked his sai around the blade, twisting his wrists inwards until he felt the satisfying shattering of the blade snapping into shards.

Spun by a sudden war cry from behind, he blocked three more attacks from the tanto-weilder, and as he fought him, felt the bitter smack of air as the rubble-strewn ground jolted towards him as the disarmed katana-wielder managed to sweep his feet out from underneath him. He fell gracelessly hard onto his side, his sai clattering out of his grasp.

It was his own fault really. His footwork had been clumsy, exposing himself to the danger of being taken off balance. And sure enough he had been, as he failed to properly catch his landing, and he felt the hopeless twist in his wrists of spraining muscle and straining ligaments as his hands splayed gauchely underneath him in a frantic attempt to break his fall.

But before he could right himself, there was sharp and delving pain in his left shoulder as the tanto skewered into him, sending a shower of bright white speckles of pain across his vision and him rocking onto the back of his shell, an involuntary cry wracking out of his lungs.

Swallowing the howl of agony, he reached forward with his right hand and tore off the mask of his attacker who was now scrambling atop his plastron. Underneath, the Foot soldier was a Caucasian teenager, with blue, startled eyes, black hair, and skin mottled by acne scars and sullied by fresh bruises.

Apparently the unmasking took the ninja by surprise and he blinked stupidly at Raphael's reeling eyes for a moment, and in that mere stalled moment, allowed the tanto to slip out of Raph's bleeding shoulder.

Seizing the opportunity, Raphael pounded forward with his uninjured arm, and felt his fist connect firmly against the boy's jaw.

The boy's head snapped to the side, and a flurry of dislodged teeth and blood flew from his mouth. The impact threw the kid off him, and Raph scrambled to his feet.

For a moment rage was his only guide and just as he was preparing to dive onto the ninja that had felled him to put him out of his sorry misery, an idea struck him.

And then he knew what he had to do.

Instead of following through on the attack, he groaned at a spasm of pain which was only partially feigned and grasped his shoulder in a manner perhaps slightly more theatrical than he would usually allow himself to exhibit.

Blood spilled over his hand. He buckled and scrambled quickly out of sight, making no effort to disguise his grunts of pain. He allowed himself to sound and look like a wounded animal retreating. Defeated.

Once he was concealed in shadows, he tucked himself behind a surviving crate and watched in renewed self-imposed silence.

The remaining ninja made as if to run after him, but appeared to think twice about it. He doubled back to his fallen comrades, and Raph saw him check their pulses.

The ninja glanced around the warehouse apprehensively.

Then he moved, running silently out of the warehouse via the demolished side.

And Raph stepped out cautiously from behind the crate, and began to follow him.

* * *

Admonishing himself for his dishonest tactic, Raphael tailed the lone Foot soldier from above.

His shoulder was throbbing angrily, but the blood had ceased to flow and was now congealing and cracking against the motion of his arms as he ran.

Oddly rational, he kept an eye on the dot of a figure below, running carefully in amongst the sleepless city's inhabitants, tiny and insect-like from Raph's position on the roofs of Manhattan.

With the hollow thumping of his feet against asphalt in steady pace and his rhythmic breathing resonating in his ears, Raph leapt between buildings, taking the occasional moment to swing on a fire-escape or flip over a line of menacing gargoyles. Movement felt good, despite his exhausted body not long recovered from potentially devastating injuries. But his blood was pumped full of endorphins and he gave little consideration to his creaking plastron and weakened left side, further damaged by the new puncture in his shoulder.

It felt so good to welcome some proper exercise. He was almost disappointed when he saw his quarry jog to a halt and climb the wide steps to the entrance of a Manhattan sky-scraper.

Despite muscles which were beginning to groan and cramp with anaerobic shock, with a final burst of energy, Raphael flew from the edge of his current roof and catching himself on the black, iron fire-escape that snaked up the building of interest. Momentum kept him flying when his fingers caught hold of the metal, reducing the tug he felt in his shoulder muscles. But the use of his left arm pulled treacherously on his wounded shoulder and the wind swept his strangled cry out of earshot. Despite being relieved of that humiliation, it seemed that fate would not excuse him from another and the pain caused him to misjudge his landing, and his legs slumped in an ungainly fall, which rendered him doubled over on his hands and knees on the fourth floor platform of the fire escape.

But the fourth floor was no good. He knew Saki and he knew his habits. Saki was not the type to be content with the fourth-floor. He would segregate himself no-where less than the top.

Relying on this concept as the sense of direction that he had lost when the Foot soldier disappeared into the building, Raph scaled the fire escape, ignoring the sound of the iron railings squeaking stubbornly on their hinges.

He reached the top, with little recollection of his ascent, but accepted his new position with a grim and ironic murmur of laughter as he pressed himself up against the window and winced into the gloom therein.

The first thing he saw was The Shredder's bladed armour, encased in a tomb of a glass cabinet.

But that was to be expected. What he did not expect was the sight that greeted him. The soldier he had just tailed from the Lower East Side, bowing before a seated figure. The words on his lips were indistinguishable to Raph, but he only needed a cursory glance at the back of the head of the leader to whom he spoke.

At the sight, a violent surge of anger scuttled up his throat, so powerfully that he tasted bile. His heart lurched crazily into a quick and unsteady pounding.

His teeth clenched and his palms grew moist with the sudden desire for vengeance.

Sitting cross-legged and sipping green tea as she listened to the Foot soldier's account, was Karai.

Raph allowed a grin to touch his lips, as he thrust his sai into the window pane, and watched with ecstatic satisfaction as a spider web of cracks snaked across the glass, and it shattered out of the frame with the glorious sound of destruction.


	7. Chapter 6 The Powers of Vengeance

_This chapter is dedicated to Sassyblondexoxo & Pretender Fanatic in thanks for their continued readership and helpful comments. _

**Chapter 6 –The Powers of Vengeance**

"Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom."

-- Mary Shelley _Frankenstein_

* * *

In the chill of an unheated room strangely devoid of luxury and lit dimly by a small table lamp, rendering the room shrouded in the night-time darkness, from his unseen position behind a pillar, Raphael glared at the back of Karai's head, spears of hatred stabbing at his gut.

As the young ninja boy finished recounting his tale to her, he lowered his upper body in a formal bow, and Karai, seated on the ground in a casual way that seemed surprisingly proletarian for a warrior of her stature, dropped her head forward before he exited through Cathedral-style doors.

Raphael allowed his eyes to trace the curve of her neck, hovering on the delicate flesh at the base of her shoulder, imagining how good it would feel to stick her right there with his sai and feel her body flail helplessly, yielding to a slow and painful death.

But he was startled from his vengeful reverie when her voice rang out in the lofty space, even though she did not move:

"I've been expecting you."

Even from behind, in a room designed for space rather than acoustics, Karai's voice was clear and melodic, resonating smoothly behind the lilts of her Japanese upbringing.

Surprised to have been detected, Raphael cringed back against the pillar in annoyance. Damn ninja.

And then she whipped her head around, sending a sashay of black hair bouncing over her shoulders, instantly meeting his eyes and fixing him with a piercing gaze.

Still brandishing his sai in an offence stance, Raphael glowered at her.

"I must warn you, Turtle," she said softly, "my ninja can be summoned at a press of a button and will shoot you down with poisonous blades without hesitation."

"Words are cheap, Karai," Raph replied lowly, advancing, though keeping his body squat. "We got some business to discuss."

She nodded sharply. She was dressed simply in black, with her hair pulled back from her elfin face with a plain headband. She had twin katanas slung across her back. Up close she looked younger than Raphael had estimated, although fine lines creased the skin around her eyes.

He continued to clasp his sai, and stalked around to face her. She remained seated, but as he approached, she offered him a brief, but sincere bow.

After a deliberated hesitation, he echoed the gesture.

"You have matters to discuss, you say," she said, "and yet you hold your weapon in a crude act of imitation. You may attack me, Raphael, but I will not grant you the sympathies of our last encounter. I assure you that I will kill you this time." A smile touched her lips, but did not reach her eyes. "But I believe that if you had come here to hurt me we would already be engaged in battle. I know your way, Raphael, and it is not one of caution."

"You got some nerve talking about caution, lady," Raphael growled, aware that he was hunching forward, glowering like a predator, "after the shit you pulled."

She appeared to feign surprise. "You seek vengeance?"

_Hell yeah: vengeance would be sweet relief_. But he bit back the temptation to fly at her with every ounce of strength in his body.

She continued: "Our last encounter was… _unfortunate_ and of course regrettable, but my motives were honourable, and your mindset is primitive. This is not a combination for a prosperous relationship. No doubt your brother Leonardo would have dealt with the situation differently. But I fear that you do not benefit from many of your brother's attributes."

Raphael scowled furiously, pushing a rising sense of grief away vehemently at the mention of his brother's name. "Leo is many things, but a good judge of character, he ain't."

For some reason, a reason that he could not pinpoint, the idea of Leo being a poor judge of character awakened a further stab of sadness, and for a moment it was tempting to allow himself to falter.

But he wouldn't have it. He had a job to do, and it was going to get done, with no time for silly indulgences of weakness.

Pulling himself together with a sigh which felt disconcertingly breathless, he fixed Karai with a menacing stare, grasping his sais so tightly that his fingers, seemingly abandoning their practice and skill, trembled. And for a moment, his anger was so rich and so overwhelming that it seemed that he would suffer another attack of… whatever crazy ailment had snatched away his breath earlier that evening.

Eventually, the words snapped out of him. "I want you to tell me where my brothers are."

"Sheathe your weapons, Turtle," she said curtly.

His skin crawling with anger, he shot her a withering look. "Look, Karai, I ain't here for formality. You tell me what I want to know or I'll beat it out of ya. One way or another, I will get what I came for. And if I get to take your pretty head on a platter then it'll be a bonus."

Karai's eyes narrowed in a disapproving wince. "Your threats are base, Turtle and are ineffective. You are in my home, illegally I might add. If you wish for my co-operation than you would do well to show some respect."

"Respect has to be earned, lady."

"If you cannot conduct yourself in a reasonable manner, than my only choice will be to summon The Foot," she said, a briskness clipping her voice. "If you had wanted carnage you would have entered this building through the door. You desire my attention, and you have it. If you want to continue this conversation then you would be wise to sheathe your weapons."

Raphael growled, paused, and then pushed the sais into his belt in stubborn gesticulation, careful not to break eye contact.

Karai's mouth slid into a restrained smile. "We are making progress," she said. "Please sit."

Raphael glowered vehemently, but lowered himself to the ground opposite her and folded his legs over one another, mirroring her position.

She sighed. "You are searching for your brothers."

Raphael nodded.

"You think I can help you."

Another purposeful nod.

"Raphael, surely you understand that your brothers were vanquished in the explosion at our headquarters."

"Along with 'Daddy'?" he hissed.

There was little, if any, reaction on her face as she replied: "It is true that I have mourned my Father of late."

The lying bitch.

"Yeah, well I believe differently."

Her left eyebrow arced in subtle amusement. "Oh? You believe that your brothers and my Father survived?"

"Your people rigged your own building!" Raphael barked. "The whole thing was a set up. You used me to lure my brothers into your trap."

"You are astute, but I'm afraid incorrect in your assumption that there were survivors," Karai answered, lowering her eyes and allowing them to stray across his damaged body, assessing the injuries and now aging wounds.

Feeling the onset of a more desperate strain of anger, the anger which was prone in the past to push him over the edge of rationalism, Raphael licked his lips quickly, breathing to calm himself. Something like panic had started to creep into his muscles, threatening to steal his demeanour at any second, and Raphael had had enough displays of weakness in the past month. He rolled his shoulders out, and drew his sais out of his belt, just to remind himself of how it felt to be strong and in control. And sure enough, the tight feeling in his chest eased, and the clawing of panic subsided as quickly as it had begun.

But the display had not escaped Karai, who clearly had read him. She nodded in understanding, and when she spoke the sense of irony was rich in her tone: "You are suffering with guilt," she said.

"Quit the psychology!" he barked, losing patience and getting to his feet. "You know they are alive. You know The Shredder left a message on the wall of that building and you know where they are. And you will tell me."

Karai stood up, reflecting his movement. "Tell me this, Turtle," she said in a commanding voice, somehow discarding the endearingly thick Japanese accent for a far more precise dialect. "If your brothers had not perished in the explosion, would you still be harbouring such torrid guilt? Or would you feel no remorse for your dishonourable actions?"

Something inside him snapped. Flashes of bright white marred his vision, and the rage that had been boiling up inside him unleashed with a choking whirr of fury. Sais on the offensive, he leapt towards her.

Ready to kill.

* * *

It seemed strange to April that it had all come down to this: herself sitting in the turtles' lair, a place which had once been a home away from home, full of warmth and cheer, but which had now been stripped of anything even resembling comfort. True, the furniture was unchanged, the fridge magnets still brightening the kitchen. But that wasn't important anymore. The loss of the turtles had robbed the place of soul.

But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was the most agonised pain the world which was staring back at her from the other side of the table.

His ears were limp, his whispers were heavy, his eyes dull and dilated in a glazed stare which did not appear to be taking in any of the surroundings.

April stirred the tea absently and offered Splinter an awkward smile.

"He'll be back," she said softly, instantly rebuking herself for the fruitless attempt to muster some comfort in her voice.

Splinter's lifted up to her and blinked, almost as though stupefied and his brows lifted in incomprehension.

"Raphael," she said. "He'll be back."

"Raphael has gone?" he said.

The feeling clawing at April's throat was not dissimilar to the helpless emotion of watching her elderly grandmother succumb to dementia a few years ago. She gave an elaborate nod of the head. "You remember? He left this evening. He…" Her voice trailed with uncertainty. "He's gone looking for the others."

"My sons are dead," Splinter said huskily. "There is nothing left now."

She reached out across the table and lay a hand across his scrawny paw. "You still have Raphael."

"Miss O'Neil. I cannot expect you to understand. But I lost four sons that day."

April felt her eyebrows draw together in confusion. Splinter was the most loving creature she had ever known. How could he say such a thing? What could make him consider his son with such disregard? Maybe the same thing which kept him away from Raphael's bedside as the terrifying limbo of worry occupied the days.

"I don't under—" She stopped herself and frowned in realisation.

Splinter was angry with Raph.

She nodded thoughtfully. "Master Splinter," she said. "Raphael told me that he had… _fought_ with one of his brothers just before the explosion."

Splinter's eyes scrunched into tight folds of fur. "This is true, but Miss O'Neil, this is not the worst of it."

* * *

With a scream rippling from his throat laced with a blur of primal emotion which was too full of disordered traces of hatred, rage, misery, pain, anger, grief and a whole other mess of tormenting guilt and shame to identify, Raphael launched himself forward, sais flying along side him in his grasp.

But Karai was a ninja for whom few were worthy, and she retorted with a whirr of movement which stopped him in his tracks, and he found that she had thrust her katana blades between the prongs of his weapons, rendering them useless.

He spun out of her block, and attacked from the side with a roundhouse kick, but again she pre-empted him, and flipped out of the way.

Her skill with the swords was exemplary, there was no denying it, and her visage was blank and expressionless as she threw each attack he summoned against her.

In a bizarre and unnerving sensation which was creeping through his gut, Raphael felt like he was fighting with Leonardo – and not because of the swords. There was a familiarity about their style and grace that he could not pinpoint.

Raphael liked a challenge in battle, but he was still not used to his greyed vision which stripped away his perspective of depth, and the cloud of emotion driving him robbed him of strategy, and he just ploughed on ahead, throwing attack after attack after attack at his opponent.

* * *

April was aware that her head was shaking slowly of its own accord.

"I never wanted my sons to know the acute pain of the need for vengeance," Splinter said, black eyes misted. "And I worked hard to keep the bitterness of my own desire for revenge hidden from my turtles. I did not want them to grow up with anger in their hearts."

April nodded, surprised and curious at this new stream of conversation.

"But with Raphael, I failed. I claim responsibility of my role in the tortured creature that he has become. But… but he was always honourable. Always loyal. I did not foresee that my son would betray both himself and his family in the name of vengeance."

* * *

Even in his grey-scale world, Raphael caught a glimpse of a glint in Karai's eyes as he came in close to repel a slicing sword by locking the prongs of his sai around the base of the blade.

"You are less docile than our last meeting, Raphael," she said calmly over the haze of steel against steel.

Raphael snarled. "That's because you had me pumped full of sedatives, bitch. It always was the way of The Foot, to pick on someone who can't fight back."

She spun her katana blades out of his lock, and sent a boot flying into his chest, sending him stumbling backwards. But he righted himself and met her eye.

Her lips had thinned and she was standing still, breathing hard. "You of all people should know, Raphael, that _you _are always capable of fighting back."

* * *

"I – I – I don't understand," April muttered softly. "Surely you can't be saying that it's Raph's _fault. _The building was rigged."

"My beloved son, Leonardo always felt an unspoken kinship with the daughter of Oroku Saki. And I do not believe that she shares her father's innate evil. But Raphael was always wary of her, and suspected the worst. All it took was for her to commit a wrong against him, and the seed was sewn."

* * *

"Where are my brothers?" Raphael screamed, above the sound of connecting steel.

"Your brothers are dead!" Karai responded, issuing a warning with a blade across his throat.

Raphael leapt into the air, and sent her flying backwards with a powerful kick to the sternum. She thumped to the ground on her back, her breath knocked out of her.

"Where are my brothers?" he challenged, flying at her fallen frame, and felling her again as she attempted to right herself, with a further kick in the shoulder.

"Your brothers are _dead_!" she hissed from her prostrated position.

* * *

Splinter's eyes squeezed shut, and April saw the fur beneath them glisten with tears.

* * *

Raphael planted a knee in the pit of her chest as he whipped a katana blade out of her hands.

With his other foot, he stepped down on her wrist so that her hand flailed and dropped her remaining weapon.

Her eyes remained open and her face resolute as she stared up at him, and he saw the lines of age etched in her skin, around her eyes and mouth and deep furrows sprang into her forehead. But she didn't attempt to move.

"Where are my brothers?" he whispered.

"I will not help you!" she retorted in a grim voice.

He leaned forward with her sword and thrust the edge of its blade against her throat. Her skin pricked into goose-bumps and her eyelids fluttered as sweat broke out on her brow and her breath quickened.

"Tell me where my brothers are, or so help me I will slice straight through your oesophagus," he growled.

"I do not fear death."

"Saki survived the explosion. And I know that because he left a message for me. I believe my brothers survived and that he has them. Why else would you have commandeered his floor? He wants me to look for him. It's another trap, but it is not one that I will not see this time."

"You know nothing, Raphael," she replied, her words truncated by the fierce grip of the blade on her trachea.

But her eyes betrayed her.

"Where is Saki?"

"You won't find him!" she hissed.

"_Where is he_?"

"You won't find him!"

* * *

Splinter shook his head. "I love my son, Miss O'Neil, and that will never change, but I cannot forget what he has done.

"Raphael has always battled hard with his anger, the way one would fight a life long foe. And for years I worked hard with him to keep the monster inside him at bay.

"But I fear that Karai's actions unleashed the beast that has lurked for so many years inside my son.

* * *

Rage boiled and frothed inside him. Even when he shut his eyes he could see the faces of his brothers dancing and shifting amongst each other on the backs of his eyelids. Fury and uncontainable hatred wracked his core, tearing at him from inside, and a voice started hooting in his mind that he would fail. Pain hit him inside the head, like the same migraine that had attacked when he first saw The Shredder's grisly message. But worse. Much worse. Like a pain he had never known before, even when his body was battered and broken. This was pain he couldn't ease by pressing it. It felt like his skull was tightening and that the gruesome matter inside was fighting to escape amongst a well of swilling blood, throbbing violently and sending blinding bolts across his colourless vision. He heard a distant clatter of steel, but didn't identify the sound as having any relevance to him. "_Where is he?! Where is he and where are my brothers!?_" Startled by the volume of his own voice, Raph caught himself mid scream, to find that not only had he dropped the sword, he was now holding a sai to his own temple, as if poised to plunge it into his own head to stop the pain and end the sorry Hell ride that was his life.

He stilled, panting, lowering his weapon as he felt his fingers slacken around the handle.

Karai's face was frozen in shock. Though released from his grip, she did not move. Her mouth hung open in astonishment, and her eyes blinked slowly. This woman had seen a lot in her days, but clearly never a furious turtle driven to the brink of suicide by a fit of rage.

Panting, Raphael met her eyes, wondering if he had regained his physical composure, or if he was shaking as much on the outside as he was inside.

Karai swallowed hard and seemed to peer searchingly into his eyes for a long time before she mustered words:

"He's in Japan," she whispered.


	8. Chapter 7 The Journey Begins

**Chapter 7 - The Journey Begins**

_"Stir not the bitterness in the cup that I mixed for myself... Have I not tasted it now many nights upon my tongue, foreboding that worse yet lay in the dregs?"_

-- J R R Tolkein _The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King_

* * *

His first instinct was to call April.

Fucking ridiculous.

Japan. How was he going to get to fucking Japan? It's not like could simply stroll into JFK and purchase an airline ticket.

He would have to go back to the lair and rethink his strategy.

But he dismissed this option as quickly as he had clung to it. He couldn't go home, couldn't face Splinter. Not without his brothers.

And he hadn't brought his cell. He hadn't used it in a month – it probably didn't even work anymore, and he hadn't the first clue about how to recharge the damn thing. That had always been Don's department.

Don.

With a growl, Raph disregarded the memory of Don which sprang up in his mind.

Without a watch and with no clocks visible, Raphael attempted to hazard a guess at the time. Midnight, perhaps? One? Two?

There were fewer people scuttling around the world below, so it had to be late. So far his evening had proved rather eventful. He had visited the warehouse, received a taunting and deadly message, had a killer migraine, gone home, trashed the bathroom, stopped breathing, had his soul snatched away, been back to the warehouse, kicked some ass, travelled across the New York City skyline, kicked some more ass, had another killer migraine, nearly killed himself… and now… ironically, the wheel had come full circle yet again and he was back at the warehouse. And all between the hours of nine and… whatever fucking time it was now.

He huddled into his shell as he peered down to the street from his position of concealment on the roof. The bitter October wind snapped at his bandana and squealed loudly in his ears.

"Hey Raph. Thought I might find you here."

Raph spun around.

Leo was standing behind him, feet firmly squared on the ground, bandana tails dancing on the whipping air, fists planted against his belt, tall and muscular. Strong.

Raphael lurched towards him, hands pawing the air clumsily, desperately trying to reach him before he vanished again. "Leo – " his breath hissed, as the wind tore his words from his throat. And then, quite neatly and almost as if planned, he broke into a deflated mess of urgent grief, dropping onto his knees with a thud, head bowed, unable to look at his brother, as he wept plaintively.

Leo's hands fell against his shoulders, broad thumb brushing tentatively over the tanto wound in his shoulder. "Raph, look at me."

Raphael kept his gaze averted. "I can't."

"You're on the right path, brother." Leo's voice was soft and comforting.

"I can't do it, Leo," Raph whispered to the asphalt. "I don't know how to get to Japan. I don't even know if you're really there, or if I just really want you to be. I don't know if this is a hallucination, or a dream, or… something worse. I just don't know…."

Leo stepped forward, his arms going around Raphael's shoulders, pulling him into his plastron, hands caressing the back of his head. The rich scent of soft leather, Leo's belt, filled his nostrils; he felt the ridges of Leo's plastron against his face as he wrapped his arms around his carapace and clung for dear life.

He regretted everything. Every moment they had fought, every minute of his life he had dedicated to hating his brother, every trivial argument. The last argument. The argument that afternoon: as he had emerged from the anaesthetic of chemical stupor, tired and angry and humiliated; as he had condemned Karai and her dishonourable schemes; as he had insisted that he lead his brothers to reclaim from her what she had stolen from him. He regretted it – every moment. But that moment most of all. He should have recognised the trap, should have known that Karai had anticipated the reaction.

He tightened his grasp around Leo's waist. "Leo," he whispered into his plastron.

"I'm here, little brother," Leo's voice chimed sadly in the roar of the wind. "I'm right here. You're on the right path, in the right direction. Please don't give up. Please don't fail us. We are waiting for you. We'll be together again soon."

Raph felt Leo's body tug away from him. "No – Leo," he cried. "Don't leave me."

"I have to, Raph. I'm not supposed to be here. I have to go back to the darkness."

"Leo. No. I need you. Please…."

Then he was alone: alone with the howl of the wind and the roar of the city beneath him. He was still on his knees, arms clasping at the nothingness.

"Goddammit!" he muttered, drawing a forearm across his eyes, blinking away his tears. "What the Hell is happening to me?"

Mustering his composure, he got to his feet, shaking out his shoulders, and walked dazed back to the edge of the building.

Japan. It was about as fucking possible as him growing wings and flying there himself.

The empty chasm in his gut seemed to widen. His insides were churning in torrents of unlabelled emotions, trapped and furious and seeking closure. Spikes were driving into his head, stabbing mercilessly.

Karai was right. Would he feel the regret were it not for the horrific result?

He had been taken on a whim, driven by the need for revenge. He wanted to make Karai suffer, helpless and defeated, unable to defend herself. Like she had done to him. He was determined to execute his own plan, despite Leo's insistences. He had left them, left them to fight the battle, left them at a disadvantage, left Leo injured, whilst he engaged in his own mission: a petty mission of revenge and destruction.

He killed his brothers.

He didn't deserve to have survived, not when the explosion had claimed the lives of so many others.

He skimmed his toes across the edge of the building.

Not when the explosion had claimed the life of his brothers….

No amount of suffering would ever make his survival acceptable. The only solution was to end his sorry existence right now. To make it right. To restore the balance. To end the eternal fucking Hell that raged inside his soul.

For a moment, the crazy idea of hurling himself from the building took him, and he pictured his body plummeting into the smog of the city from above, slamming into the concrete and smashing into fragments. Finish the job that should have been finished the day of the explosion.

A grim smile curled his mouth at the thought of the fear that his appearance would incite in the world below. He would cease to be a silent protector; he would become the very violence that New York feared.

He leaned forward, and peered down into the world he loathed, and loved. The world he wanted to leave forever.

And that's when he saw the Greyhound, chugging through the street in a mist of exhaust fumes.

* * *

The clock inside the station said it was three twenty-five AM. People were few, but present.

He scaled the wall using the drainpipe for leverage, until he was peering down from the veranda. The bus was directly underneath him, engine humming softly. The driver was outside, leaning against the vehicle smoking a cigarette, grey embers glimmering in the darkness.

Whilst the driver's attention was diverted, Raphael edged forward, and let himself drop. He landed stealthily on the roof of the bus, and heard the protracted grown of metal and steel as he thumped into it. Surprisingly, the driver below didn't appear to even flinch.

He drew his sais, and growling under his breath, he plunged each one into the roof, anchoring them firmly to the bridge. Again, the driver didn't seem to notice, and flicked his cigarette butt onto the pavement, quelling its flame underfoot. He disappeared then from Raph's view, and Raph felt the bus shift as the driver took his seat and put it in gear.

Raph took a breath, and lay flat, grasping the grips of his sais.

Pretty soon, the engine revved and the air around him began to move, shifting calmly across his skin as the Greyhound bus pulled out into traffic.

The soft lap of air gently escalated into a rush of wind, a force which threatened tauntingly to slacken his fingers. If he let go, no amount of ninjutsu skill would save him, he would be thrown from the top of the bus into the oncoming traffic in its wake. He closed his eyes. Focused. Focused his energy on his grip, keeping himself atop that bus.

In twenty-five hours he would be in St Louis. Missouri. Half way across America.

* * *


	9. Interlude 2

_He had made it nearly to the edge of the east side of the building, his feet thumping heavily as he ran, the rain still beating upon his face, and wind smacking against his small body as he ran against it, like a salmon fighting its way upstream. _

_He was blood-thirsty. He was enraged. Screw Leo and his honour. Karai had already successfully proven herself to be well and truly without honour. Why should she get special treatment, just because Leo was conflicted?_

_That bitch was going to pay for what she'd done, for each moment of pain she'd inflicted upon him, each bind that forbade his self-defence, the overwhelming sense of helplessness and fierce anger. She had thrust upon him that which he most dreaded: his own fury. She would pay for the clear serum her medics had injected into his veins, the serum which had him writhing in an agony of fury, pain and impending sedation. She had weakened him into a state of stillness: defencelessness. On his own honour, she would pay. _

_He could hear Donatello's voice behind him, shouting his name, his words choked with his own breed of helpless anger. But Raphael continued to run, his breath in his ears and feet pounding on the wet asphalt._

_He flashed a quick glance over his shoulder: Leo was still sitting on the ground, cradling his arm across his plastron; Don stood frozen, with his bo on the offence; Mike stood in partial combat with a Foot Ninja. They were all watching him. He could see the expressions of horror and disappointment on their faces, the grief in Leo's eyes, the grim despondency of the reality they had always anticipated, always feared, but never really believed in: their tempestuous brother, driven not by honour and code, but by the madness of vengeance, to disobey the orders of his master and leader in favour of serving his own agenda. _

_The Foot were interspersed across the rooftop, two or three were running after him in determined chase. _

_And over it all, all the mayhem, presided The Shredder, uniformed in his almighty armour, adorned in blades and reflections of light in metal. He stood still and motionless, taking in the glory of his fighting minions, watching as they battled in an ecstasy of war cries and blood._

_But he didn't care. He didn't care that his brothers were outnumbered and wounded. He had only one preoccupation:_

_He had the word 'vengeance' in his mind when, as if a blanket of white had suddenly cloaked the world, his hearing snapped out, and the wind, which had moments ago being a vigorous obstacle, was overcome by another force, from behind him. _

_He was propelled forward, almost in slow-motion. He slammed down onto the concrete, and he felt a protracted agony in his chest and stomach as he felt something on his underside buckle. But he didn't have the breath to cry out, or time to register what had happened. _

_He was flying forward, aware only of the power which had swept him up. Even in mid-flight, his deafened ears were already giving way to a high-pitched tinnital ring. _

_Reality seemed very contorted as time both slowed down and sped up at the same time. Vivid pain, everywhere, like he was being scraped against a giant block of sand-paper. He thumped into brickwork, and heard his own voice grunt out a cry of shock and horror, before the suffocating deafness returned. Falling now, his left side crashed into cinderblock and exquisite agony tore through his arm and face as his flesh was scoured away from muscle and bone, and blood splatters across his vision as the world rushed by in his frantic descent. Again his left side smashed against the wall, and something else inside him seemed to disintegrate into shards of broken matter._

_And then came the impact. A violent crash of bone on pavement as he thumped onto what his mind hazily identified as street-level concrete. His hearing returned fleetingly, but long enough for him to hear the sickening crack of splintering keratin as he bounced off his shell, vibration rocking his body, and was flung forward until he landed on his front, skidding ruthlessly the last few yards against the scouring grit of the New York City pavement. Something metal brought him to a tortured stop, whacking him on the skull._

_Even as his mind reeled in the chaos of pain and confusion inside his head, a tiny fragment of clarity remained: a grain of knowledge in running sands of agony and conflagration, potent and simple: _this is the end. Nothing will ever be the same_._


End file.
